Posts by Dave Bell 2133 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007
You can add a couple of connecting leads to that, and maybe a suitable PSU,
But I remember the early single-board computers, and that's nothing at all unusual as a list of the needed extras. Though a Nascom sold at 200 quid, which would be around 1000 of today's money-thing tokens.
Yes, uphill, both ways, in the snow. Kids today...
A Chinese assembly plant was contracted to build 10,000 units according to a specified design.
Either the design specification was incorrect, or somehow the wrong components were acquired and fitted.
I have known whole packing crates of components be mis-labelled. This might not have been something obviously wrong to the people at the assembly plant. The parts fitted together. I don't know enough to know whether it would have needed special testing to detect.
I sort of expect everybody involved to be trying to find out whether they made the mistake, without admitting anything. And maybe this is a small enough contract that the cost of just fixing things is going to be far less than the cost of a public argument over who made the mistake.
Micro-size SDHC cards can give you a cheap 16GB, power from the USB port on the TV, and Bluetooth...
Finding a decent Bluetooth keyboard seems to be hard (I know a few tablet users who are still looking) but this could turn a TV into something with the power of a netbook. Is this the heart of an STB, or of a general purpose computer?
It's both, I think. Even if it is a bit of a geek toy at the moment.
Of course, it does look a bit silly to be running a cable underwater up the narrow Red Sea, but when you look at the neighbouring countries you wonder if things could be any safer by land.
The first telegraph cable from London to India went mostly underwater for similar reasons of security. Some of those little red dots on the map were there to provide telegraph stations.
We used to have something like Grand Juries in the British legal system. The French have judges in charge of police investigations. There are all sorts of different ways of organising these things.
There are probably a good few meetings between the Police and the CPS which we never hear about. I'm not sure our system is all that much better than that which anyone else uses.
Yeah, but at the end of the day an email like this really should be written with an eye to how it might look in court. Stratfor only had to say that an indictment was likely, and handling of any relevant information should keep that possibility in mind. It didn't need to suggest they had their own, possibly illicit, contacts within the US Government.
This one is obviously of potential interest to the lawyers, not like, "Jack, can we do lunch tomorrow?"
And some other companies quickly got some things better.
First, the way these sensors work, each pixel only records one of red, blue, and green. So, much like analog TV they end up with a high-res brightness signal overload with lower-res colour data. If the 41MP is genuine, you're going to get the colour detail at 10MP.
Second, anyone remember Fractal Image Format. It they're doing something like that with the lower-res colour data, it could be interesting, technically.
Third, I'm not sure that any of the well-known lens manufacturers are significantly different in their ability to make a lens, but they may well choose different compromises in the design. If the lens design is matched to the sensor and the processing, it gets more points than if it's just another Zeiss Tessar.
I shall wait for reviews based on some testing, rather than press releases.
But it looks like way too much camera to be a phone. Let's see who ends up licensing the tech.
Somebody is sure to say that this can't work. The point is that the centre of drag is different from the centre of mass, and that can be stable, but it needs an airflow, which you don't really get as you drift down-wind. A sea-anchor does work, but it is taking advantage of the two different working fluids, air and water, and their different behaviour.
It only needs slow relative movement of the sea anchor in the water to stabilise the boat. The wind-generated surface waves aren't always moving in the same direction as the local wind, and that is when things get complicated.
No, I don't think this will work. It's about as much sense as putting sails on a Zeppelin.
The thing is, Moffat finished the "how did the Doctor die" story arc with the Doctor having to avoid attracting attention. And I want to see how he handles that, because if he can manage a season which doesn't need the end of Earth, the end of the Universe, or the end of Time, as a climax, the show can be sustained for a long time. I have mixed feelings about some of his writing, but at his best you see marvels.
Just don't blink.
The original publication, whether 1954 or 1955, was under the old US system which required formal registration, and had provision for one renewal before a 28-year copyright term expired.
If it didn't fall out of copyright by a certain date, it then fell into the current US scheme.
It's that copyright renewal that is the critical issue, and thus whether the work was published in 1954 or 1955. But it is quite possible for the author of a work published under the old system to be alive today, and they would feel rather bitter about Hollywood lawyers if they were in this situation. There were other features which went against authors.
This is actually a rather big issue. It isn't so unusual for registration dates to be some time after the actual publication. Which one counts? And then there is the difference between the date of application and the date the registration is assigned by the Copyright Office.
Get your can of worms here.
This looks pretty cheap, as satellites go, and is going to be doing something rather difficult. The Swiss are developing something that will do an orbital rendezvous and docking with an un-instrumented target, and I bet everyone planning ISS robot cargo missions will be interested in the results. And for a first mission, a successful grab and de-orbit will be pretty good going. Then you can start to think about more complicated solutions, which would allow the sweeper satellite to stay in orbit and hunt down something else.
In the longer term, we're getting into space-tug territory. The control systems have a lot of applications.
Some light is reflected by window glass, rather than passing through. And the light which passes through will warm the building. Some places, with a lot of sunlight, already use window glass treated to block the excess light. So reducing the light transmission reduces solar heating, and reduces the load from air conditioning. Generating electricity can help even more.
With the right design of the window system, things such as angles, you might be able to take advantage of the different solar altitude in winter and summer, and get better heating effect in winter, but I doubt many building have been built with that in mind.
I know where you're coming from. Ubuntu 10.4 runs fine on my netbook. Later versions, the UI went wrong. Maybe too much overhead, certainly a visual design that didn't suit the screen-space.
And when I tried the current Live CD, earlier today. I couldn't find any way of making the UI--level font sizes readable. Maybe it can be done, but how?
(I now expect to be inundated with links to web pages explaining what to do.)
That's been the pattern for as long as people have been using computers and modems. One of the early "hacking" trials appeared to use a grossly inflated value for one of the illicitly copied documents, even though it could, as I recall, be bought from the company, on paper, for some trivial amount.
The plaintiffs make dodgy claims so often that, if it were noticed, they'd struggle to get any more cases heard. They're serial liars, and if that isn't contempt of court, I'm not sure what would be.
You are correct that the design of a survey can influence the result. A part of an answer to that is to ask the same question in different ways. A check on the possibility of bias is to publish, as part of a research paper, the questions which were asked.
In light of that, your assertion goes beyond doubt into denial. Your assumption that the researchers are biased liars is no better than an unquestioning belief that this report accurately presents the results.
The Social Sciences, done right, can employ powerful mathematical tools. The surveys can be repeated, so as to test the original results. Give a social scientist a thousand orphans, a hedge maze and enough cheese...
We distrust them, and yet so many of us are suckers for politicians.
One thought: the current data protection principles seem to require a good back-up policy. So there are going to be archived copies of the personal data.
Can you reasonably expect an individual's data to be deleted from those back-ups, maybe write-once media in off-site secure storage?
It isn't so hard to envisage a system which keeps a list of data subjects whose data is no longer permitted to be accessed. But if the politicians get it wrong, the law is going to require impractical deletion of data from archives.
I suspect a similar argument covers some of the copyright boiler-plate I see, involving those irrevocable licences to copy all your data.
And, very obviously, if somebody has stopped being a customer, what is the point of all the profiling?
I know that, over the years, my book-buying habits have changed. Look at how some writers have changed: there is a huge difference between <i>The Hunt For Red October</i> and <i>Against All Enemies</i>. I do wonder if a retailer can get anything useful from ten-year-old data. There are few books that last that long in the market.
The way skin reacts to light is complicated. Things such as sub-surface scattering. And some sorts of make-up change the balance between the surface effects and the sub-surface effects. You then have small-scale surface features, smaller than any wrinkle, which affect the surface reflections, and which are modified by the make-up.
It is the sort of thing which gives that slightly plastic look.
There used to be a lot routinely done in the darkroom, even if only the contrast grade of the printing paper and the exposure time. That has to be done in the computer now.
But, going by what I remember, there's still something that feels wrong about that explanation above.
I am rather curious about where they put the line between safe and unsafe consumption. As I've seen it reported, the safe consumption claimed in this study is up to 6 drinks a week, and the reports didn't specify the size of the drink. That leaves me wondering if the question asked in the survey was something like "Do you drink diet soda every day?"
The old netbook UI which Ubuntu supported suits the netbook I have Linux installed on. I wouldn't insist on a dead ringer for that, but it copes with the relatively small screen and amount of RAM.
So I'm using the 10.04 LTS version of Ubuntu. With the support, it's fine.
Is Mint an adequate substitute in that situation?
I don't expect everything announced on Wednesday to get through the European stages of the process. That's how the system works.
Then the legislation is implemented at the national level, precisely because the legal systems are different and use a local jargon, in an attempt to get the same legal results in all EU countries.
Our unequalled Justice Minister will get his chance to modify the proposals. It's a shame that his boss has aligned with the extreme elements in the European Parliament, and pissed off so many with his recent actions. But he can be assured that British MPs will let him get away with sabotaging the legislation.
Our politicians cheerfully blame Europe for every little mistake they make.
I have very mixed feelings about the way that the original three Star Wars movies have been reworked. The original space-battle seems used ground-breaking tech, and we seem to have lost so much of that with CGI replacements, but making Mos Eisley look more like a busy small city often worked (one or two visual jokes, not such a good idea). None of that changed the story.
The big problem can be summed up by the declaration that "Han Solo shot first". The first movie to be made enthralled a generation. It combined being a huge success with acquiring cult status.
Mess with the story at your peril.
Will I be able to install Windows 8 on a machine which doesn't have this secure loader feature, such as a machine I bought with Windows 7. Or a machine I assembled from parts?
Will Windows 8 be available to small companies assembling computers from parts.
Given that different countries have different laws on corporate structures, can Microsoft reliably distinguish between private individuals and businesses in setting their rules on who can do what?
We banned burning crop residues in the UK, around twenty years ago.
It increased the fuel use by farmers for land cultivation, and increased the use of expensive pesticides. In countries where these are not an affordable option, crop yields will likely drop.
I really hope that this report has taken those factors into account, shifting from a CO2 neutral process to one of increased use of fossil hydrocarbons, both as energy source and chemical feedstock. From my own knowledge, politicians don't care to think about what their schemes cost farmers.
Is there any difference between, for instance, Woolworths and Amazon, other than that Woolworths went bust in the UK? They're both in the business of selling almost everything you want.
I'd be more worried about PayPal. They're just a bank, so why did they order the destruction of an antique violin when a deal was questioned by the buyer?
Some of this should be pretty damn obvious. Hollywood is in California and, even without the craziness surrounding such things as movie piracy, there is some point in giving this protection to such people as actors. It seems to have died off, but there was once a lot of speculation about the face of a famous actor could be appearing in films after he died, through looming computer graphics tech. There are actors who have died during the production of a film, and some ingenious work done to finish the film--voice imitations, careful use of long-shots, that sort of thing--and protecting a likeness does set out the basis for dealing with these things.
Apple wouldn't want a fake Steve Jobs making adverts for rival companies.
But this seems to go way beyond the obvious reasons for such a law. You can start with setting up the rights needed for somebody to be able to make a deal, or put an enforceable clause in a contract. And then a bunch of politicians get bought, and a few lawyers make ingenious arguments in court, to get the best for their clients, and the result starts to seem insane.
1: From a discussion elsenet, it seems that many large corporations, which are doing such things as providing communications, tend to select sociopaths as decision makers. So I am disinclined to choose corporate interests as my chief protection.
2: It doesn't matter whether you use paper mail, the telephone, or the internet, the bastards still ignore you.
3: There is a good deal of stuff you cannot easily do without internet access. Without it, everything costs more.
This leads to the conclusion that we, as almost powerless individuals, need active government regulation of the corporations which provide services to us. But corporations are very good at buying control of governments.
The Kindle works well. It's not the only e-reader out there.
I suppose everyone knows about Baen Books at www.baen.com who have been using free electronic editions as a promotional tool. I wonder how the explosion in e-reader numbers will affect them. But they have a lot of free SF.
There are some decent cheap e-books from Amazon, and some real rip-offs. If you want to read "A Princess of Mars" go to Project Gutenberg. The version I got from Amazon has most of a chapter missing.
That 1-in-40 could be a pretty high percentage of those who read books for fun. The per capita annual book sales in the UK are roughly the same value as the cost of a Kindle About a quarter of adults don't read books, Half read fewer than five a year.
Original trek female crew uniform seems quite achievable, though a lot of this stuff would be solidly protected by trademark law.
Still, generic spacecraft interiors ought to be possible. Maybe a touch of steampunk. Green body paint is almost geberic enough that they could get away with it, but body paint tends to rub off. I have, a time or two, seen some pretty effective paint jobs, things such as fur and snakeskin, but I doubt they could cope with the maintenance.
On the whole, I doubt they could fake my fantasies. See "A Reconsideration of anatomical docking manouvers in a sero-gravity environment".
This is beginning to sound like one of those James Bond films, where the bad guys spoof GPS to provoke a war.
Thing is, a GPS signal is essentially a time-stamped data packet. Delay that signal, and what the receiver sees is that it is further from the satellite. You can't make the receiver think it's nearer a satellite. But the receiver will use the strongest signals it gets. So a touch of noise jamming to mask the original, plus a boosted and delayed signal sounds plausible to throw off GPS. But whether it is practical, outside of a Tom Clancy novel, I couldn't say.
Oh, and a light-nanosecond is about a foot. Natural variations can easily be a hundred nanoseconds from things such as atmospheric density.
No, I don't think it's necessary to break the encryption
You can't be a proper aeronautical engineer from Southampton unless you've served an apprenticeship at a steam engine factory.
And a piece of advice: "If anybody ever tells you anything about an aeroplane which is so bloody complicated you can't understand it, take it from me: it's all balls."
I see that Grimsby is on the list.
It was one of the pioneers for Cable TV, and had local TV on that.
It didn't work out then. I'm not at all sure that it will work out now. At least, with several miles of Lincolnshire Wolds between me and Grimsby, I can't see it as a problem.
It sounds as though they tried this in totally the wrong place, but I'm not sure what the right place would be. A smoothbore cannon firing a 30-pound shot was seriously heavy artillery, the sort of weapon used by the heaviest ships of the line. Any firing range has a "danger-space" behind the targets, and this incident shows why.
I think the talk could be of something a bit different. There have been various rotating chamber guns over the years, from the relatively crude idea of the revolver to some modern aurcraft cannon.
The Gatling design was essentially six complete guns, each chamber having its own bolt, extractor/ejector, and firing mechanism. A Victorian alternative was the Hotchkiss Rotating Cannon, which was more of a multi-position press, with loading, firing, and case extraction done by fixed single mechanisms.
http://youtu.be/GkOP8Lwdmgg is a video showing the Hotchkiss mechanism
The type of mechanism which might be used in this gun would be the Dardick, where the cartridges are not round, but triangular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardick_tround for the basic info
I know, I'm being geeky
Given the standards of contemporary corporate culture, and the recent record of the Civil Service, it is hard to trust either of them.
And nuclear power is a long-term project. So what examples do we have for stable administrative systems, not dedicated to short term profit, known for the building of large structures and their long term maintenance?
Maybe we should give the Archbishop of Canterbury the job of sorting all this out.
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